


the music of fear

by ornategrip



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ornategrip/pseuds/ornategrip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The legend that wolves fear the sound of string instruments may have a basis in fact, as captive wolves in the Regent's Park Zoo were shown to exhibit signs of intense distress when hearing low minor chords."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the music of fear

**Author's Note:**

> For this [prompt](http://grimm-kink.livejournal.com/452.html?thread=793028#t793028) on the grimm kink meme.
> 
> Everything I know about the cello, I learned from wikipedia.

The cello looked innocuous enough.

Innocuous as his floorboards wiped clean of Hap’s blood.

Monroe tuned his instrument with a single-minded focus that would have put any hunting predator to shame, fingers moving deftly along the pegs, tightening and loosening as needs be. She would play beautifully tonight, his cello, deserved far better than him plucking her strings.

But what you deserved and what you got were two very different things.

He settled the instrument between his knees, lifted the bow and pressed it against the strings but didn’t play. Instead he shut his eyes and breathed deeply, the wolf within him already shying away. The wolf didn’t like the cello, even feared it, the sound wrong to it’s ears the same way it was right to Monroe’s human ones.

In the beginning, when he was still half-feral and desperate for control, he had picked the cello for that main reason. Any string instrument would do but it was the cello he bought, the cello he practiced on day in and day out, until his fingers ached and bled.

Letting the wolf know it wasn’t in control anymore. Punishing it for thinking it was in control in the first place.

Playing had hurt at first, the pain near overpowering as the wolf thrashed and howled, clawing at itself in it’s misery. But Monroe had played on and slowly, so slowly the human part of him began to take precedence, the pleasure of creating music pushing the wolf’s blind distress to the back of his mind. He began to believe the wolf was a separate entity, one he could lock away, step away from and say ‘that’s not me’.

But he and the wolf were one and the same and Monroe had been a fool to believe otherwise. Stupidly confident and Hap had been the one to pay, dying alone and afraid while Monroe ran with the night.

Monroe opened his eyes, steadied his hand and the first low chord was like a whip to his back, cutting his flesh and making him bleed. The wolf screamed in it’s cage- but no, that was wrong. _Monroe_ screamed in his cage, shook with the pain but continued to play and play and play.


End file.
